Gasp (Visions) (8 page)

I catch Trey’s eye and grin despite the situation. Ben is definitely a keeper.

“Okay,” I say, realizing everybody’s looking to me to call the next play. “Great job, Ben. Seriously. We couldn’t do this without you. Thank you. I guess . . . I guess we just wait. I don’t know what else to do. We have no date or time, no exact location, not even a reasonable vicinity.” A sense of doom descends over me, and unexpected emotion clogs my throat. “So, I don’t know.” My voice squeaks at the end, and Sawyer and Rowan both put their arms around me. “I guess I failed on this one.”

“Stop it,” Trey says, and his eyes flash. “You didn’t fail. The victim failed you. It’s not your fault. We are not God.” He pauses. “Or dog.”

I half smile through watery eyes and nod. But I can’t help it. I still feel like a failure.

•  •  •

The next morning, as I’m drying my hair, Sawyer texts me.
I’m outside the front door. Can you come out?

I set down the hair dryer with a clatter, slip past Rowan, and run down the hallway and through the dining room and kitchen and breezeway, and fling open the door. I go outside in my bare feet to Sawyer.

Sawyer, with the thick hair and green eyes and ropy lashes.

Sawyer, the boy I love.

Sawyer, who is holding a newspaper.

He looks at me, solemn, wordless. And he points.

I don’t want to look. But I do it anyway.

On the local news page, one headline reads:
TWO DEAD, TWO CRITICAL FROM CARBON MONOXIDE POISONING NEAR ADA PARK.

I look at him. My lip starts trembling. “Are you sure it’s the right house?”

He nods. And then he reads for me, “ ‘Emergency response teams were called to a home on South Loomis Street late last night after a Boston man’s repeated, unsuccessful attempts to reach his sister and brother-in-law and their elderly parents. The older couple were pronounced dead at the scene, and the younger man and woman remain in critical condition. It is unknown . . .” Sawyer trails off. He lets his arms drop heavily and looks at me.

“. . . if they’ll survive,” I say softly, finishing the report. I sink to the step and bury my face in my hands. Sawyer sits next to me and wraps his arms around me. But I cannot be consoled.

By the time I look
up, Sawyer has magically summoned Rowan and Trey, and they’re staring at the news like they can’t believe it. And then they say it. “I can’t believe it.” And I almost want to shake them, because I told them this would happen. They know this. But they don’t understand the coarse reality of the visions like I do. Like Sawyer does.

I collect my racing thoughts and stand up. “I need to get ready.” Without another word, I march inside and finish my hair, feeling numb. Those people could’ve been fine. That man in a distant city, so concerned about his sister, his parents, that he called 911. That man who has to bury not only both parents at once, but also grieve for his sister and brother-in-law, who could die any minute.
That man could’ve been fine too, going about his business, but not now.

All this because Tori wouldn’t tell me the information I needed. And I realize that if I’d only known the cause of death, we could have gone door-to-fucking-door up and down Loomis Street with a carbon monoxide detector a
week
ago, and saved their lives.

“It would have been so
easy
!” I yell at myself in the mirror, and I slam down the brush and take off down the hallway, shoving past Nick and Rowan on my way to grab my backpack, and then I go outside, where Sawyer still remains like I knew he would, waiting for me. I climb into his car and we go to school like good little students, and all day my fury grows. And grows. Kind of like the fire that burned down my family’s life. And I’m not sure if I can contain it.

After school I don’t even have to say it—it’s like Sawyer can read my mind.

“You want to visit Tori?” he asks.

“Yes, please.”

And without trying to stop me or suggest I wait a day until my anger dies down, he drives me to the UC hospital. And I am so furious I can’t wait for the elevator, so I take the stairs two at a time, and Sawyer follows. We go down the hallway to Tori’s room, and for a split second I worry that maybe she’s not there. Maybe she’s been discharged, and I won’t get to yell at her after all.

But my split second of worry is for nothing, because when I get to her room and open the door, there she is, sitting up, talking to her mother. Looking beautiful. I want to kill her.

They look up at me when I come in, and I almost falter, but I can feel Sawyer right behind me, and I know I have to do this. For me. For that poor man and his family. Then I almost falter again when I realize I forgot to bring the newspaper in, but Sawyer slaps it into my hand just before I make an ass of myself, and I walk over to Tori with it and shove it in her face. “Does this look familiar?” I ask, pointing to the photo of the house with the ambulance outside. I shake the paper a little to get her to look at it instead of me.

Mrs. Hayes gets to her feet and starts pointing at me, protesting my presence, but then she catches the look on Tori’s face and stops. She goes to look at the article too.

As I watch the look of horror grow in Tori’s eyes, I start to shake. “You did this,” I say in a low voice. I look at Mrs. Hayes. “It’s your fault they died.”

They are stunned. “Is that the house you . . . you saw?” Mrs. Hayes asks Tori.

She nods. She won’t look at me.

Mrs. Hayes will, though. “The vision is gone,” she says. “It’s over.”

I want to punch her in the face. “That’s because
this
happened! There’s no saving anybody now. They’re dead! You both had the power to help stop this, but you didn’t help. You didn’t believe me. You wouldn’t let Tori talk to me.” I stop to breathe, to try to keep my voice low so no one comes in.

“I couldn’t see my phone screen anymore to read your texts or respond,” Tori says, distressed. “Plus, I was so sick from the constant movement. But now it’s gone. No more vision.” It’s like she doesn’t grasp what happened.

“Tori,” I say. “Listen to me. If Sawyer had done what you did—if he hadn’t believed me, or had refused to do anything about what he was seeing,
like you did with your vision
, you would be dead. You. Would be dead. And ten others in that music room
would also be dead
. You are alive because Sawyer acted on his vision. These people are dead because you wouldn’t act on yours.” I slap the newspaper. “Do you get it now? Do you?”

Sawyer puts his hand on my shoulder and I stop talking. Tori weeps into her hand, teardrops falling between her fingers onto the newspaper.

Mrs. Hayes at least has the dignity not to kick me out. But I don’t need any encouragement to leave. I’ve had enough. And I think I said enough. Probably just a little too much.

On the way home my anger begins to subside. But
there’s still something that infuriates me. Something I can’t let go of.

“Her vision,” I say after a while, “it just went away. Just like it did for us after we risked our lives. Only she didn’t have to risk anything except motion sickness and her mom being mad at her.”

Sawyer nods. He’s worn a thoughtful expression since we left the hospital. “I noticed that. I’m not sure what I think about it either. Like, I should feel relieved, but really I’m kind of pissed off about it.” He drums the steering wheel with his thumb. “It sure might have been easier to just ride it out and pretend like people weren’t dying. If we’d only known . . .”

I look at him. “It wouldn’t have been easier for me.”

The corner of his mouth twitches and his eyes don’t leave the road. He reaches over and takes my hand.

I don’t want to go
to my aunt Mary’s. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I feel bad that I’m ignoring Trey and Rowan when I know they’re probably reeling from all of this too, but I can’t help it—I need an escape right now. It’s like everything’s closing in on me and I can’t breathe. Sawyer takes me to his cousin Kate’s apartment. She’s not home.

It’s a cute little place near the community college where she goes to school. Two tiny bedrooms and an even tinier bathroom. But a big kitchen. Isn’t that how every home should be?

“Sit,” Sawyer says with an Italian accent, sounding eerily like his grandfather Fortuno, magistrate of the evil Angotti empire. “I cook for you.”

I grin for the first time in days, sit down on the sofa, and relax, reading Kate’s fashion magazines while Sawyer bangs around in the kitchen. I text my mom so she knows where I am. And it occurs to me just how much more freedom I’ve had since the restaurant burned down. Not only because I don’t have to report for my job but also because my parents have had too much stuff on their minds to keep up their reign of terror over us. Our whole family has been forced to adapt, and that part, at least, has been in my favor.

I look up and watch Sawyer cook, and I think how wonderful it is that we have this thing in common. How we learned to feed people from our parents, and they learned from their parents and grandparents, and so on down the line. Sawyer hasn’t spoken about his parents since he moved out. I guess I’ve been hogging all the attention these days.

“Have you seen your parents lately?” I ask.

“I stopped in to see my mom the other day. She’s fine.”

“That’s good. I bet she was glad to see you.”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t press him on it. I can tell he doesn’t want to talk about them.

“So,” Sawyer says after a while, “do you think your father still has visions? Or do you think he had one and it stopped after its tragedy happened, like Tori’s did?”

I’ve been thinking about that. “I guess I don’t know. I
mean, I believe he’s had one for sure, obviously. But . . . I don’t know.” I frown, puzzled. Something doesn’t add up.

“Maybe it’s not a repeating vision that’s been driving his depression all this time,” Sawyer says lightly, pulling toasted raviolis from the broiler and plating them with a small bowl of marinara and freshly grated cheese—from here it looks and smells like Pecorino Romano, but I’m not sure. “Maybe it’s the guilt of not having saved people.”

I think about that. And I don’t know. I might never know.

But I do know that I’m hungry and this bad boy in the kitchen can cook.

•  •  •

When Sawyer drives me home, I invite him to come inside. And he does. He offers a nervous hello when I officially introduce him to Aunt Mary and Uncle Vito, but they greet him with warmth. When my mom comes up to him, he plants a kiss on her cheek, which makes her smile, and my dad doesn’t yell or kick him out. He just leaves. Probably heading to the ash heap to find some more treasures. I still think that’s progress. The Sawyer part, not the treasures part.

Once Sawyer and I migrate to the living room with Trey and Rowan, I ask them, feeling a little ashamed, “You guys doing okay? I’m really sorry I blasted out of here.”

“It’s just weird,” Rowan says. “I feel so bad.”

Trey nods. “It sucks. It’s like we had this power to do something good, and we didn’t use it.”

“Not
didn’t
,” Sawyer says. “
Couldn’t.
We did our best. We did everything we could think of to stop it. But we can’t force some stranger to give us what we need.”

“And now it’s over,” I say softly. I still can’t believe it. “I mean, I think so. There’s nobody for Tori to pass the vision curse to.”

“Tori told us the vision is completely gone,” Sawyer explains, and he fills in the others on our visit.

And it’s a boring Friday night for the first time in forever. None of us are working. There’s no vision to ponder. Ben shows up after a while and we all hang out in Aunt Mary’s living room, even the cousins, and we play this game called Apples to Apples, and after months of stress, it’s like I’m finally starting to decompress. It’s over.

It’s really over.

When my dad comes home around nine, he doesn’t have pocketfuls of scavenged burned junk. He has ice chests and ice and bags of groceries. We stop our game and look up as he stands in the kitchen, arms laden.

“Two things,” he says in his old familiar, booming voice, and it shocks me to hear it again after so long. “First, our new landlord just called and said we don’t have to wait until the fifteenth—the house is ready and we can move in on Sunday.”

We try not to cheer too loudly because we don’t want to seem ungrateful, but we are all ecstatic over this news.

“And second,” Dad continues, holding up a bag of groceries, “Paula and I are taking Demarco’s Food Truck out tomorrow. And next week, and the next, and every day until we open the doors of our new, improved restaurant!”

The household breaks into applause, and I cheer too, at first, until the doubt creeps in and all I can do is clasp my hands together and stare at my dad’s flushed cheeks and triumphant smile, and wait for the cracks to come back and ruin it all.

Mom and Dad start preparing
the sauce on Aunt Mary’s stove for tomorrow’s big day in the meatball truck. We go back to our game, eventually forfeiting so the little kids win, because Aunt Mary says they have to go to bed as soon as the game is over, and we just want to get rid of them because we’re selfish teenagers like that.

Nick sticks around and hangs out with us because all his friends are working tonight. He doesn’t say much. We don’t really have anything in common, even though he’s between Trey and me in age and we played together a lot when we were little. We haven’t been close since I started elementary school, even when he spent an occasional day working for the restaurant.

So things are somewhat quiet, and we can’t talk about
what happened with the vision even if we want to. And strangely, I don’t want to. I snuggle into Sawyer and he drapes his arm over my shoulders, and it feels wonderful to be safe and stress free for once.

I think about the man who has to bury his parents. I look up at Sawyer and murmur, “Should we go to the funeral?” And I love that he immediately knows what I’m talking about.

“We can do that. I’ll try to find out when it is.”